they think, to sabre peasants, the devil take you!"

"Well, well," said Tonsard, "what is there in all that to frighten you
like kids? What can they get out of my mother and daughters? Put 'em
in prison? well, then they must feed them; and the Shopman can't
imprison the whole country. Besides, prisoners are better fed at the
king's expense than they are at their own; and they're kept warmer,
too."

"You are a pack of fools!" roared Fourchon. "Better gnaw at the
bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you'll get your backs
broke. If you like the galleys, so be it,--that's another thing! You
don't work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you
don't have your liberty."

"Perhaps it would be well," said Vaudoyer, who was among the more
valiant in counsel, "if some of us risked our skins to deliver the
neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the
gate of the Avonne."

"Do Michaud's business for him?" said Nicolas; "I'm good for that."

"Things are not ripe for it," said old Fourchon. "We should risk too
much, my children. The best way is to make ourselves look miserable
and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us,
and you'll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning."

"You are all blind moles," shouted Tonsard, "let 'em pick a quarrel
with their law and their troops, they can't put the whole country in
irons, and we've plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the